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An issue is the most basic entity in JIRA Core. Depending on your team and its needs, issues can represent different things. In the Dragon Design Tees project example, each issue would represent the work needed to create and complete new t-shirt designs.

Create your first issue

Let's create an issue to track the creation of a new t-shirt design.

Choose Create in the JIRA Core header.

Fill out the fields using the sample data is shown below. Only the fields with * are mandatory.

Project: Dragon Design Tees

Issue Type: Task

Summary: Create a contractor resources spreadsheet

Description: The spreadsheet must contain a breakdown of all contractors and specific skill sets.

Leave all other fields blank or at their default values.

Choose Create to create your new issue. A confirmation message will display for a few seconds. Make note of the issue key of your new issue (e.g. DT-1).

Create a two more issues to familiarize yourself with the process.

Editing an issue

You can easily edit your issue to add more information, attach new files or screenshots, and more. Inline editing is the quickest way to edit an issue. To access all issue fields, including blank fields that don't appear when inline editing, you can use the Edit Issue dialog.

In your project, select Issues from the project sidebar and open the first issue you created.

Hover over the Priority field. Click to edit the field.

Change the Priority to "Critical" and click anywhere outside the field to save your change.

The issue will be updated immediately. Now, let's see how to start working on an issue.

Need to create multiple issues?

Checking the "Create another" check-box on the 'Create Issue" dialog will keep the dialog open after you click Create.

Progressing the issue

Every issue has a lifecycle. In JIRA Core, the lifecycle of an issue is managed by a workflow. A workflow consists of the issue statuses (e.g. To Do) and the transitions between each status (e.g. Start progress). In this step, you'll start working on your issue by transitioning it from the To Do to In Progress statuses.

Open the first issue you created (e.g. DT-1). The issue should be in the To Do status.

Select Start Progress. The status of your issue will be changed to In Progress.

You can then choose to stop progress, or close the issue by marking it as Done and selecting a resolution.

Notice that resolving an issue prompts you to enter more information, whereas starting progress on the issue did not. Some issue transitions have screens associated with them in the workflow associated with your project. Remember, a project can only have one workflow associated with it.

Assign the issue to another user

You can better manage your work by assigning issues to other members of your team.

Open one of the issues you have created (e.g. DT-2).

Choose Assign on the issue.

Type emma in the Assignee field and select her as the assignee from the drop-down list that appears.

Type (don't copy and paste) the following text in the Comment field, then choose Assign.

Hi @emma, I've assigned this issue to you to work on this week.

You will notice a few things when you enter the comment:

When you start typing after the @ symbol, you will be prompted to choose a user: emma, in this example. Emma will be sent an email notification that links to the issue, when you save. This feature is called mentioning a user.

On choosing Assign:

The issue will be assigned to Emma with a comment added to it.

A link will be automatically created to the issue in the issue comment.

About workflows

JIRA Platform ships with default workflows. The workflows can be changed and customized, but this can only be done by an Administrator.

Awesome! You've created some issues, edited one, and assigned another to a member of your team. You're really getting the hang of working with issues. Now, you'll learn how to best search for the issues you need to work on.